Abstract

We report a study of the effect of hydrostaticpressure on the magnetocaloric effect in a single crystal. The single crystal exhibits a much larger magnetic entropy change than the corresponding polycrystalline samples, reaching and for a magnetic field variation of and , respectively. Under hydrostaticpressure, the peak position of significantly moves to higher temperatures due to the shift of the magnetic phase transition, from under ambient pressure up to under a pressure of , while the maximum value of remains nearly the same. These exceptional results demonstrate that the magnetocaloric effect in magnetic materials with strong spin-lattice coupling can be effectively tuned by pressure.

Received 22 July 2005Accepted 02 February 2006Published online 08 March 2006

Acknowledgments:

This work was supported by the State Key Project of Fundamental Research and the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China. The financial support of the GA CR, project No. 106/06/0368, is also acknowledged.